Tuesday, October 20, 2009

I read this article on the Washington Post website today about how Wall Street bankers are getting obscene paydays but prudent savers around the country are still getting almost zero interest on their savings. The article is titled “Uncle Sam's gift to the prudent saver: Less money” and written by Allan Sloan. Read the article and see below for my response.

Where's the public outcry against this? We've not seen this kind of unbalance in Capitalism between the rich and the poor since the days of the robber barons. This is the conversation we should be having, not shouting matches over fictitious "death panels" and silly congressmen carrying on in sessions of Congress. Seems that the only ones who get riled up when they take a hit to the pocketbook are Wall Street bankers. Then things get done. But let Mom & Pop savers lose 40% of their safe investment income and nobody bats an eye.

I see a lot of people saying that the people who bought houses and used credit cards are getting bailed out. That's not exactly true either. Many people are underwater in their homes because they were advised by mortgage lenders to get into exotic loans to purchase houses that surely would continue to increase in value.

After the market went bust foreclosures are on the rise yet the banker who are supposedly holding the bag on these loans are getting extremely significant bonuses only a year after the bailouts began? Seems the savers and the spenders are being screwed here and the government only put aside enough money to help the big giant banks become zombified yet strangely profitable again. Sure many banks failed and continue to fail but those are the smaller ones, and they may get sold off to bigger "healthier" banks anyway, with the help of the Fed or the FDIC.

So banks are profitable, the Stock Market rallies yet joblessness is at almost 10% across the US. Seems cutting the consumer out of the picture on both sides (workforce and lending) is profitable for corporations, huh?

Obviously banks and business can't cut their way to profitability forever. Funny, I hear all kinds of crying from the right about a "socialist agenda" but I see nothing of that coming to the people of the United States, only the bankers and big businesses.

So much for socialism. I believe the ideal in socialism was for the people to benefit, not businesses. We could use a little of that corporate socialism in health care and jobs for real people please so we can work to live. For some reason our government can't get over the hump of helping companies and get to the work of helping its people.

Main Street is more important than Wall Street any day. Main Street built Wall Street.

Main Street is where the businesses are built that become listed on the stock exchanges of the world. It's the garages and home offices that ideas are hatched and things are still built that become the next big thing. It's where people who go to work everyday pay for the things that fuel our economy. After all our economy is consumer driven and that's not the small percentage of CEOs and executives that get big bonuses, it's regular folks who make modest salaries and buy things like clothes, food, gas, cars and iPods. It's also small business owners who employ people, buy supplies, and service the local economies.

Everyone needs to remember this: Main Street built Wall Street. It continues to build Wall Street and without Main Street, Wall Street will not survive. If we don't start to realize this very soon, things will get worse, much worse.